Improving our information diet is essential, not only to avoid getting distracted, but also to put our time to much better use and learn new things and skills instead.

more empathy for their future self, and that was related to a decrease in procrastination.” They realized that time wasn’t infinite. Future them was no longer a stranger but someone to be protected. To get us off our butts, it seems, we need to grapple with the finite nature of our time on Earth.

The mere act of making a to-do list relieves so much itchy stress that it can, paradoxically, reduce the pressure to actually get stuff done.

districts won by Democrats account for 61 percent of America's gross domestic product, districts won by Republicans 38 percent.

Residents of districts won by Democrats generate 22% more output per worker, and have a 15% higher median household income.

Quick notes are perfect for capturing a thought on one device

You can take note in OneNote while on a phone call, quickly add check-boxes turning the notes into a to-do list.

and bullet journal for more modern take on commonplace books

The 8 Steps of Taking Smart Notes Ahrens recommends the following 8 steps for taking notes: Make fleeting notes Make literature notes Make permanent notes Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the slip-box Decide on a topic to write about from within the slip-box Turn your notes into a rough draft Edit and proofread your manuscript He notes that Luhmann actually had two slip-boxes: the first was the “bibliographical” slip-box, which contained brief notes on the content of the literature he read along with a citation of the source; the second “main” slip-box contained the ideas and theories he developed based on those sources. Both were wooden boxes containing paper index cards.  Luhmann distinguished between three kinds of notes that went into his slip-boxes: fleeting notes, literature notes, and permanent notes.  1. Make fleeting notes Fleeting notes are quick, informal notes on any thought or idea that pops into your mind. They don’t need to be highly organized, and in fact shouldn’t be. They are not meant to capture an idea in full detail, but serve more as reminders of what is in your head. 2. Make literature notes The second type of note is known as a “literature note.” As he read, Luhmann would write down on index cards the main points he didn’t want to forget or that he thought he could use in his own writing, with the bibliographic details on the back.  Ahrens offers four guidelines in creating literature notes: Be extremely selective in what you decide to keep Keep the overall note as short as possible Use your own words, instead of copying quotes verbatim Write down the bibliographic details on the source 3. Make permanent notes Permanent notes are the third type of note, and make up the long-term knowledge that give the slip-box its value. This step starts with looking through the first two kinds of notes that you’ve created: fleeting notes and literature notes. Ahrens recommends doing this about once a day, before you completely forget what they contain. As you go through them, think about how they relate to your research, current thinking, or interests. The goal is not just to collect ideas, but to develop arguments and discussions over time. If you need help jogging your memory, simply look at the existing topics in your slip-box, since it already contains only things that interest you.  Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you turn fleeting and literature notes into permanent notes: How does the new information contradict, correct, support, or add to what I already know? How can I combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by these new ideas? As answers to these questions come to mind, write down each new idea, comment, or thought on its own note. If writing on paper, only write on one side, so you can quickly review your notes without having to flip them over. Write these permanent notes as if you are writing for someone else. That is, use full sentences, disclose your sources, make explicit references, and try to be as precise and brief as possible.  Once this step is done, throw away (or delete) the fleeting notes from step one and file the literature notes from step two into your bibliographic slip-box. 4. Add your permanent notes to the slip-box It’s now time to add the permanent notes you’ve created to your slip-box. Do this by filing each note behind a related note (if it doesn’t relate to any existing notes, add it to the very end). Optionally, you can also: Add links to (and from) related notes Adding it to an “index” – a special kind of note that serves as a “table of contents” and entry point for an important topic, including a sorted collection of links on the topic Each of the above methods is a way of creating an internal pathway through your slip-box. Like hyperlinks on a website, they give you many ways to associate ideas with each other. By following the links, you encounter new and different perspectives than where you started. Luhmann wrote his notes with great care, not much different from his style in the final manuscript. More often than not, new notes would become part of existing strands of thought. He would add links to other notes both close by, and in distantly related fields. Rarely would a note stay in isolation. 5. Develop your topics, questions, and research projects bottom up from within the slip-box With so many standardized notes organized in a consistent format, you are now free to develop ideas in a “bottom up” way. See what is there, what is missing, and which questions arise. Look for gaps that you can fill through further reading. If and when needed, another special kind of note you can create is an “overview” note. These notes provide a “bird’s eye view” of a topic that has already been developed to such an extent that a big picture view is needed. Overview notes help to structure your thoughts and can be seen as an in-between step in the development of a manuscript. 6. Decide on a topic to write about from within the slip-box Instead of coming up with a topic or thesis upfront, you can just look into your slip-box and look for what is most interesting. Your writing will be based on what you already have, not on an unfounded guess about what the literature you are about to read might contain. Follow the connections between notes and collect all the relevant notes on the topic you’ve found. 7. Turn your notes into a rough draft Don’t simply copy your notes into a manuscript. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument. As you detect holes in your argument, fill them or change the argument. 8. Edit and proofread your manuscript From this point forward, all you have to do is refine your rough draft until it’s ready to be published. This process of creating notes and making connections shouldn’t be seen as merely maintenance. The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process. Instead of figuratively searching our memories, we literally go through the slip-box and form concrete links. By working with actual notes, we ensure that our thinking is rooted in a network of facts, thought-through ideas, and verifiable references.

The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Deloitte, a consultancy, reckons that the internal rate of return on in-house R&D at a dozen big drugs firms fell from 10% a decade ago to 2% in 2019—below their weighted-average cost of capital of 7%. The average cost to bring a drug to market has increased by two-thirds since 2010, to some $2bn. And the forecast for peak sales for each new drug has also fallen by half over that period

From an employers perspective, I believe there are many advantages:

We know we can't hold a lot of things in our mind at once. While you’re focusing on deep work, minimise the number of things in your mind. Don’t connect to everything else.

Despite important agricultural advancements to feed the world in the last 60 years, a Cornell-led study shows that global farming productivity is 21% lower than it could have been without climate change. This is the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases since the 1960s.

Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Now fast forward six months and assume the project or goal has failed. Tell the story of how it happened. What went wrong? What mistakes did you make? How did it fail? In other words, think of your main goal and ask yourself, “What could cause this to go horribly wrong?” This strategy is sometimes called the “kill the company” exercise in organizations because the goal is to spell out the exact ways the company could fail.

If you don't control your schedule, it will control you.

Create a note by selecting some text and clicking the button

You cannot measure the health of journalism simply by looking at the number of editors and reporters on the payroll of newspapers. There are undoubtedly going to be fewer of them. The question is whether that loss is going to be offset by the tremendous increase in textual productivity we get from a connected web. Presuming, of course, that we don’t replace that web with glass boxes.

the frozen nature of the text seem more like a feature than a bug, something they’ve deliberated chosen, rather than a flaw that they didn’t have time to correct.

Now, it may well be true that Apple, and The Times, and The Journal intend to add extensive tools that encourage the textual productivity of their apps. If that happens, I will be delighted. The iPad is only about two weeks old, after all, and it famously took Apple two years to introduce copy-and-paste to the iPhone OS.

Ecologists talk about the “productivity” of an ecosystem, which is a measure of how effectively the ecosystem converts the energy and nutrients coming into the system into biological growth. A productive ecosystem, like a rainforest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, like a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information. Call it, in this example: textual productivity. By creating fluid networks of words, by creating those digital-age commonplaces, we increase the textual productivity of the system.

Anyone can apply these same methods on the job. Say you have someone in your company who is a masterly communicator, and you learn that he is going to give a talk to a unit that will be laying off workers. Sit down and write your own speech, and then compare his actual speech with what you wrote. Observe the reactions to his talk and imagine what the reactions would be to yours. Each time you can generate by yourself decisions, interactions, or speeches that match those of people who excel, you move one step closer to reaching the level of an expert performer.• • •

We believe good tools lead to excellent creations.

Progress in a scientific field has never been a function of total effort.

“Being under constant surveillance in the workplace is psychological abuse,” Heinemeier Hansson added. “Having to worry about looking busy for the stats is the last thing we need to inflict on anyone right now.”

For example, to help maintain privacy and trust, the user data provided in productivity score is aggregated over a 28-day period.

But by default, reports also let managers drill down into data on individual employees, to find those who participate less in group chat conversations, send fewer emails, or fail to collaborate in shared documents.

Bringing this back to filtering, not only am I saving time and preserving focus by batch processing both the collection and the consumption of new content, I’m time-shifting the curation process to a time better suited for reading, and (most critically) removed from the temptations, stresses, and biopsychosocial hooks that first lured me in.I am always amazed by what happens: no matter how stringent I was in the original collecting, no matter how certain I was that this thing was worthwhile, I regularly eliminate 1/3 of my list before reading. The post that looked SO INTERESTING when compared to that one task I’d been procrastinating on, in retrospect isn’t even something I care about.What I’m essentially doing is creating a buffer. Instead of pushing a new piece of info through from intake to processing to consumption without any scrutiny, I’m creating a pool of options drawn from a longer time period, which allows me to make decisions from a higher perspective, where those decisions are much better aligned with what truly matters to me.

As it becomes more clear what are specific functional jobs to be done, we see more specialized apps closely aligned with solving for that specific loop. And increasingly collaboration is built in natively to them. In fact, for many reasons collaboration being natively built into them may be one of the main driving forces behind the venture interest and success in these spaces.

To understand this is to understand that there is no distinction between productivity and collaboration. But we’re only now fully appreciating it.

Nine Changes I Made in the Shift from Busy to Productive

photographing their marginalia, markers, and books

I adhere precisely to The Bullet Journal System with no creative variations. No habit tracking, no elaborate designs or meticulously designed spreads. Does this make me a minimalist? No, I just use the system as it was intended. While social media loves artfully laid out spreads I use the system exactly as described in the website. Pencil to paper, usually in a basic notebook.

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Neither ought anything to be collected whilst you are busied in reading; if by taking the pen in hand the thread of your reading be broken off, for that will make the reading both tedious and unpleasant.

Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted.

Second, I have a not-very-well supported theory that’s paired with the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The behavior design implication of that book is that you need to speak to two systems of the brain. Speaking to the rational, Slow System is easy. Just lay out the facts.Speaking to the emotional Fast System is much harder, namely because it’s so hard to see or introspect on what’s going on in there. But if you accept that difficulty (and this is the part of my theory that feels like pop brain science), then you realize that you need to start looking for ways to rewire your emotional core.Then, having accepted that rewiring your emotions is part of most behavior design, I’ve started to notice things — like that most self-improvement advice is not very rational. That’s by design. A self-improvement book is mostly emotional rewiring. That is exactly why you need to read the entire book rather than cheating with a summarized version.

We have to know what to shoot for to simplify our lives. It means saying no over and over again to the unimportant things flying in our direction every day and remaining focused on saying yes to the few things that truly matter.

He simply mastered the art and practice of setting boundaries for himself.

Table 3. WBGT exposed levels in °C at different work intensities and rest/ work periods for an average worker with light clothing.

To be reliably able to focus on something, you need to be intuitively, emotionally invested in the outcome.

The output of knowledge workers is extremely skewed based on focus. The productivity tiers seem to be:<10% focused on the job at hand: meaningful risk of getting fired.10-50% focus: “meets expectations,” gets regular raises.50%+ focus: superstar, 10x engineer, destined for greatness.

If you can't understand where it's coming from in the stack traces, please post screenshots or create reproducing sandboxes and we'll try to help. Most of these are probably coming from a few libraries, so the most productive thing to do is to reduce these cases and then file issues with those libraries.

The trick is to work at 85% capacity rather than 100%. It can be surprisingly challenging to take your effort down a notch and keep it there — especially right now when so many livelihoods feel precarious. But going full-throttle all the time actually works against you. When your mind is relaxed, you’re able to produce better, more thoughtful results.

How to Get into Flow States, Quickly

The dream of Slack is that they become the central nervous system for all of a company’s employees and apps. This is the view of a clean *separation* of productivity and collaboration. Have all your apps for productivity and then have a single app for coordinating everyone, with your apps also feeding notifications into this system. In this way, Slack would become a star. With every app revolving around it. Employees would work out of Slack, periodically moving to whichever app they were needed in, before returning to Slack. But productivity *isn’t* separate from collaboration. They are the two parts of the same loop of producing work. And if anything collaboration is in *service* of team productivity.

See it as an experiment where failure yields valuable insights 🔬.

Time management is more about a system that works and less about a tool or just a method

Why [[Tyler Cowen]] still responds to every [[Email]] and loves it. He finds time for this because of what he doesn’t do: he hardly watches [[TV]], **his social life is basically the same as his intellectual life **- his social life is geared towards thinking, discussing, exploring ideas. With no TV, you end up with a lot of [[time]]. #[[unproductive internet activities]] Isn’t [[email]] a low leverage use of his time? **He learns a lot from people that email him, and has filtered his audience so it’s mostly smart people. **He does this by being "sufficiently weird". He’s not even sure it’s highly leveraged. He met [[Patrick Collison]] that way. He doesn’t care if it’s highly leveraged if he’s learning from it. #[[Audience Building]]

I could get a lot more done in an 8-9 hour day with a PC and a desk phone than I get done now in a 9-10 hour day with a laptop /tablet / smartphone, which should allow me to be more a lot more productive but just interrupt me. I don't want the mobile flexibility to work anywhere. It sucked in management roles doing a full day then having dinner with friends and family then getting back to unfinished calls and mails. I much prefer to work later then switch off totally at home.

Some free, digital Zettelkastens include zettelkasten.de, zettlr, and roamresearch. I use Roam.

The key is to make connections between ideas during note-taking, way before you need to review them for your work. This forces you to actively connect the dots (during note-taking) and lets you find relevant ideas with ease in future.

German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. One thing you should know about Luhmann—he was extremely productive. In his 40 years of research, he published more than 70 books and 500 scholarly articles. How did he do accomplish this? He credits it to his Zettelkasten which focuses on connections between notes.

“The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It’s the lack of a deadline. Give someone an enormous task, a supportive community, and a friendly-yet-firm due date, and miracles will happen.”

The interface is slightly less polished (and, unfortunately, I experience a delay between opening it and getting a chart), but the tracking works. Since it is in Vue I love, one day I might modify it to my needs.

It is a modern-day “memento mori”

With Intention I:know how much of my time is spent on distractions,decide how much time I need,I see the countdown (so I know if I need to wrap-up a reply, or if it makes sense to start writing a new one),it automatically blocks these sites,yet, it distinguishes between “normal use” of YouTube and e.g. using it for creating a workshop on deep learning (looking for video abstract of recent papers).

There are a few plugins (e.g. ColdTurkey) that are “too nuclear”. Being halted in the middle of writing a reply (on Facebook or Hacker News), with no prior warning, left me disturbed.

Airtable is database driven where you will be working with a spreadsheet for managing data from different sources

Notion is more about creating a hub of knowledge or a knowledgebase

When you ask yourselves a lot of why, you might be overwhelmed about those kind of questions, because this kind of question require a lot of time, context, and knowledge to be answered.

First things first, I am new to emacs and the eco system so there are packages I’m not aware of.

managers fail to see and address this problem is that they are used to looking at communication and assume it's a good thing. Because they see activity

A study conducted by Gloria Marks, a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, revealed that it takes us an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to refocus on a task after an interruption, and even when we do, we experience a decrease in productivity

It doesn't mean that we ignore all messages and only look up from our work when something is on fire – but the general expectation is that it's okay to not be immediately available to your teammates when you are focusing on your work

Working in an open office renders us even more vulnerable

Office hours are chunks of time that makers set aside for meetings, while the rest of the time they are free to go into a Do Not Disturb mode

People think it’s efficient to distribute information all at the same time to a bunch of people around a room. But it’s actually a lot less efficient than distributing it asynchronously by writing it up and sending it out and letting people absorb it when they’re ready to so it doesn’t break their days into smaller bits.”

context switching between communication and creative work only kills the quality of both

since most powerful people operate on the manager schedule, they're in a position to force everyone to adapt to their schedule

For managers, interruptions in the form of meetings, phone calls, and Slack notifications are normal. For someone on the maker schedule, however, even the slightest distraction can have a disruptive effect

Immediate response becomes the implicit expectation, with barely any barriers or restrictions in place

70% async using Twist, Github, Paper25% sync using something like Zoom, Appear.in, or Google Meet5% physical meetings, e.g., annual company or team retreats

According to the Harvard Business Review article “Collaborative Overload”, the time employees spend on collaboration has increased by 50% over the past two decades. Researchers found it was not uncommon for workers to spend a full 80% of their workdays communicating with colleagues in the form of email (on which workers’ spend an average of six hours a day); meetings (which fill up 15 percent of a company’s time, on average); and more recently instant messaging apps (the average Slack user sends an average of 200 messages a day, though 1,000-message power users are “not the exception”)

Praca w Facebooku - doskonała znajomość JSa, React, zarządzanie projektem OSS na GitHubie, prowadzenie społeczności, pisanie dokumentacji i wpisów na blogu.Szkolenia - dobra znajomość JSa, React, tworzenie szkoleń (struktura, zadania, itd), uczenie i swobodne przekazywanie wiedzy, marketing, sprzedaż.Startupy - dobra znajomość JSa, React, praca w zespole, rozmawianie z klientami, analiza biznesowa, szybkie dowożenie MVP, praca w stresie i dziwnych strefach czasowych.

Defining what “time well spent” means to you and making space for these moments is one of the greatest gifts you can make to your future self.

Stary, dobry Uncle Bob mówi, że poza etatem trzeba na programowanie poświęcić 20h tygodniowo.Gdy podzielimy to na 7 dni w tygodniu, to wychodzi prawie 3 godziny dziennie.Dla jednych mało, dla innych dużo.

Z gier można wyciągnąć też inną naukę. Jeśli Twoim celem jest przejście do następnej lokacji, to czy musisz wykonywać wszystkie zadania poboczne?No nie musisz. Dlatego wyżej, gdy podawałem wymagane umiejętności dla osoby, która prowadzi szkolenia z Reacta, albo pracuje dla startupów, to napisałem “dobra znajomość JSa”, bo “doskonała” nie pomoże Ci w osiągnięciu tego celu.

W miarę jak będziesz się rozwijać i zdobywać nowe informacje, Twój plan będzie trzeba dostosować do nowych warunków.

Arnie miał wielkie plany, ale nie realizował wszystkich na raz.Skupił się na jednej rzeczy - kulturystyce - bo wiedział, że to otworzy mu drogę do Ameryki i do aktorstwa.

Jeśli wybierzesz kilka rzeczy na raz to ryzykujesz, że znowu zaczniesz miotać się we wszystkich kierunkach.Nie polecam takiej opcji, bo właśnie przez takie myślenie kończymy potem wkurwieni, z siwymi włosami i podkrążonymi oczami.Doświadczyłem wszystkich tych trzech objawów i dopiero kiedy skupiłem się na jednej rzeczy, to odzyskałem balans i przestałem się denerwować.

Niestety, jeśli faktycznie chcesz być najlepszą osobą, to z moich obserwacji wynika, że trzeba zapierdzielać.

W czasach młodości Arniego, Reg Park był wielką gwiazdą kulturystyki, sławnym oraz bogatym aktorem i otaczały go piękne dziewczyny.Arnie chciał się wydostać z zadupia w Austrii, przeprowadzić do Ameryki i mieć dokładnie to samo co Reg.Wolność, sławę, kasę i dziewczyny.Wszystkie jego działania były podporządkowane dotarciu do tego celu.Arnie dokładnie zawęził czego chce.

create the consequences that work with your personality.

“If you could have done it on your own, you already would have done it.”

consequence three was he had to write a $1,000 check to the presidential candidate — this was before the race is over — to the candidate that he hated the most and then he took that check, this is the genius part of this, he took that check put it in an addressed enveloped, sealed and put a stamp on it, gave it to a friend and said if you don’t hear from me on this date saying, “I finished my book you send that. Don’t give me a day, grace period, don’t give me anything. If you don’t get that, you send that,” and that was enough motivation for him to finish his book and to call his friend and have her tear it up.

Automation helps us keep these steps out of our way while maintaining control through fast feedback loops (context-switching is our enemy).

As developers we love our own local setup. We spend a lot of time and effort on making sure our favorite code editor and command line shell is as we want it to be, everything else is subpar, a hindrance to our productivity. The local environment is king. It’s where we should be coding our load test scripts and from where we should initiate our load tests.

Studies show it takes ~23 minutes to deeply refocus on something when you get disturbed

if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy

Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation

The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice

The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. A graph included in the paper, which shows the average time spent working versus the waking hours of the day, is essentially flat. The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods

the elite players slept an hour more per night than the average players

the elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average players, and the best of the best were the most relaxed of all

The art of napping has the power to double creative productivity. Churchill was a famous biphasic sleeper. His naps let him squeeze two productive days into 24 hours

Right-click (or Control+Click, or a Two-Finger click on trackpads) on the file or folder in the Mac Finder

In general, use synchronous communication when the following is true

Pyramid of Remote Team Communication post.

Slack boasts that users spend 9+ hours per workday connected to the app. 90 minutes of active usage spread over 9 hours is a whole lot of interruptions.

synchronous communication is when you send a message and the recipient processes the information and responds immediately. In-person communication, like meetings, are examples of purely synchronous communication

asynchronous communication is when you send a message without expecting an immediate response. For example, you send an email. I open and respond to the email several hours later